She was slightly shivery, her face burning and her pupils dilated.
“Bad timing,” Alik decided, and brought half a bottle of brandy out of the kitchen. He poured two glasses and concluded magnanimously: “Well, let’s face it, this experience is indispensable for you. You are a poet, and in the last analysis, is this not the material that poetry is made from? Now you know there are higher forms of fidelity than sexual. I already knew that. You and I are both researchers, Masha. It’s just we have different areas. At the moment you are making a discovery of your own, and I can understand that. And I won’t stand in your way.” He poured them each another glass.
Brandy was the right prescription. Masha soon buried her face in his shoulder and murmured: “Alik, you are the best person in the world. You are my fortress. If you want, let’s go anywhere you like.”
They comforted themselves in each other’s arms, and reassured themselves of their eliteness, and confirmed to themselves their superiority over other family couples of their acquaintance who might indulge in all sorts of petty mischief, transient couplings in a locked bathroom, and have all sorts of piffling lies and baseness in their lives whereas they, Masha and Alik, were totally open and lived a life of purest truth.
Three days later Alik went back, leaving Masha with the children, the washing, and her poetry. She would be spending another month and a half in the Crimea, because Alik had brought her the money needed for that.
Two days after he left, Masha wrote her first letter. To Butonov. And followed it up with a second and a third. In the intervals between writing letters, she wrote short, desperate poems which she herself liked very much.
Butonov conscientiously collected her letters from the mailbox. He had given Masha his Rastorguevo address only because during the summer, when his wife and daughter went to stay at the university-owned dacha of Olga’s friend, he usually stayed in Rastorguevo rather than in his wife’s apartment in Khamovniki. Butonov never worried about keeping secrets from his wife: Olga wasn’t nosy and would never have dreamed of opening someone else’s letters.
Masha’s letters surprised him greatly. They were written in tiny handwriting which sloped backward, and had drawings in the margins and stories from her childhood which had absolutely no bearing on anything; and for some reason they contained references to writers he’d never heard of, and a lot of hints that were quite unclear. In addition, the envelopes contained separate sheets of rough grey paper with poems. Butonov guessed she had written them herself. He showed one of the poems to Ivanov, who knew about that sort of thing. Ivanov read it aloud with a strange expression:
“Though love is of the soul, the body hale
has at this feast its own allotted ration.
You put your hand in his in joyous fashion:
the warmth that makes your spirit quail,
the blazing heat of carnal passion
are measured on a single scale.”
“Where did you get this, Valerii?” Ivanov asked in astonishment.
“A girl sent it to me,” Butonov said, shrugging. “Any good?”
“Yes. She probably lifted it from somewhere. Although I can’t think where,” Ivanov pronounced his highly professional judgment.
“Out of the question,” Butonov retorted confidently. “She’s not the kind to copy someone else’s stuff. She wrote it herself, I’ll swear she did.”
He had already forgotten about his latest southern romance, but this sweet girl seemed to have given it some quite excessive significance. Butonov had never had anyone sending him letters, had never written any himself, and had no intention of replying to these; but still they came.
Masha kept walking to the post office in Sudak and was terribly upset when there was no reply. Unable to bear it any longer, she rang Nike in Moscow and asked her to go out to Rastorguevo and see whether anything had happened to Butonov or why he wasn’t replying to her. Nike refused irritably, saying she was far too busy.
Masha was mortified: “Nike, what are you saying? Have you gone crazy? I’ve never asked you to do anything like this before! You have a new affair every season of the year, but I’ve never known anything like this!”
“Oh, to hell with it! I’ll go tomorrow,” Nike agreed.
“Nike, I beg you! Today! Go this evening!” Masha implored.
The next morning Masha again walked all the way to Sudak with the children. They romped around the town, went to a café, and had an ice cream. She didn’t manage to get through to Nike, though. There was no one at home.
That evening Little Alik fell sick. His temperature went up and he started coughing. It was his chronic asthmatic bronchitis, which was the reason Masha stayed down here with him for two months at a time in the Crimea.
Masha was dancing attendance on him for a whole week and only on the eighth day did she get to Sudak. There was still no letter for her. Actually there was, but only from Alik. She phoned straight through to Nike who reported drily: “I went to Rastorguevo. I saw Butonov. He has received your letters, but he hasn’t replied.”
“But is he going to?” Masha asked stupidly.
“How should I know?” Nike responded testily.
By now she had actually been to Rastorguevo a number of times. On the first occasion Butonov had been surprised, but everything had been relaxed and fun. Nike really had only intended to run Masha’s errand but ended up staying the night in his large, half-redecorated house.
He had started renovating the house two years before, after the death of his mother, but somehow things had come to a halt and the half which had been redone stood in striking contrast to the half-wrecked part which was cluttered with wooden trunks, rough peasant furniture left over from his great-grandfather’s time, and lengths of handwoven cloth. There, in the wrecked half, Nike built their hurried little nest. Leaving in the morning, she did remember to ask him: “Why don’t you reply to her letters? She’s really upset.”
Butonov was used to being informed on but didn’t like being told off. “I’m a doctor, not a writer.”
“Well, try very hard,” Nike suggested.
The situation struck Nike as comicaclass="underline" Masha, as clever as clever could be, had fallen in love with this very basic stud. He suited Nike admirably: she was in the middle of getting divorced; her husband was being a complete bastard and making all sorts of demands, even to the point of wanting his share of the apartment; her fill-in lover had finished his film production course in Moscow and left; and her long-term Kostya was annoyingly eager to embark on a life of matrimonial bliss with her as soon as he heard about the divorce.
“If it’s that important, write them yourself,” Butonov muttered.
Nike laughed uproariously. The suggestion struck her as wild. How she and Masha would laugh together about all this nonsense once her sister got over being so hot for him.
CHAPTER 15
Medea retired from her job in the autumn, on the Revolution Day holiday in November. Her immediate plan for filling her new free time was to mend the quilts, which became tatty unbelievably quickly over a summer season. In readiness she got in satin material and a boxful of good bobbin thread, but discovered the first evening she laid a distressed quilt on the table that its flowers were detaching themselves from their faded background while others, three-dimensional and shifting, came floating in to replace them.